Leonard Lodish

Leonard Lodish
  • Samuel R. Harrell Emeritus Professor
  • Leader and Co-founder, Global Consulting Practicum
  • Emeritus Professor of Marketing

Contact Information

  • office Address:

    767 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
    3730 Walnut Street
    University of Pennsylvania
    Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: entrepreneurial marketing, expert systems in marketing, marketing decision support systems, marketing experimentation, marketing resource allocation, promotion and advertising decision support., sales force decision support

Links: CV

Overview

Leonard M. Lodish is Professor of Marketing and Samuel R Harrell Professor Emeritus in the Marketing Department of the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania. Len was the Founding Vice Dean for Wharton’s San Francisco campus from 2001-2009 and is currently Senior Advisor and co-Leader of the Venture Initiation Program in San Francisco. He was also the founding Wharton Vice- Dean for Social Impact from 2009-2012. From 1978-2017 he was co-Founder and Leader of the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum (GCP) that had subsidiary partnerships with leading business schools in Australia, Chile, Israel, Peru, China, Taiwan, India, UAE, France, and Spain.  Through the GCP program, groups of Wharton MBA’s worked with MBA students at the partner institution on real projects to help a foreign client company leverage a relationship with North America or a North American firm leverage a relationship with the partner country. GCP delivered over 400 strategically sound, fact based, operational plans to its clients.  Len was elected Chair of the Wharton Marketing Department from 1984-1988 and 1992-1994.

Professor Lodish’s primary research and consulting areas are in entrepreneurial marketing, strategic and tactical marketing resource planning, marketing decision support systems, and applications in firm/marketing strategy, sales force, advertising, and promotion planning.

As a part time entrepreneur, Professor Lodish co-founded Management Decision Systems, Inc. (MDS) in 1967 with $4000 of initial equity capital.  In 1985 (after raising no other outside equity) MDS’s, 300 employees, merged with Information Resources, Inc. to become a premier international decision support and marketing data supplier. He was a corporate director of public companies Information Resources from 1986-2003, Franklin Electronic Publishers from 1992-2009, and J&J Snack Foods from 1992-2013.  He also was co-owner and co-founder of Shadow Broadcast Services in 1991 that was sold to Westwood One, Inc. in 1998. He is currently a strategic advisor to First Round Capital, Leadedge Capital, Blumberg Capital, Lumia Capital, Vintage Venture Funds, and Mentor Tech Funds. Len cofounded Musketeer Capital in 2014 to advise and invest in Entrepreneurial Ventures.

Len also is or was a director or advisory board member of private companies – Compete.com( purchased by WPP), DVtel(now a part of FLIR), Diapers.com (now Quidsi and part of Amazon), Milo.com (now part of Ebay), Notehall Inc (now a subsidiary of Chegg, Inc.), Oxicool, Sight Machine, InfoScout(sold in 2017 for almost $300 million), Realfood Works, Brad’s Raw Chips, Powergetics,Inc, (now STEM), and Totspot,  Len was the first outside director of Diapers.com which was the fastest growing Internet retailer for 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 and was sold to Amazon.com for over $500 million in 2011. Len was also the first outside director of Milo.com that was sold in 2010 to eBay for over $70 million after only 2 years in business. Professor Lodish has consulted with many major firms world wide, including Procter and Gamble, Anheuser Busch, Syntex Laboratories, Merck and Company, McNeil Consumer Products Company, the Campbells’ Soup Company, Bentley Systems, Inc., Merrill Lynch, the Coca-Cola Company, and Walsh/PMSI.

In 1995, he initiated, developed, and currently teaches Wharton’s Entrepreneurial Marketing MBA Course and wrote Entrepreneurial Marketing: Lessons from Wharton’s Pioneering MBA Course, with Howard L. Morgan, and Amy Kallianpur, published in 2001 by John Wiley. In 2007 Wharton Publishing published Marketing that Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing can Add Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company, written by Len, Howard Morgan, and Shellye Archambeau.  “Marketing that Works…” was revised in 2016 with Jeffrey Babin as an additional author and published by Pearson. Len has published over 60 articles, is active as an editor in leading Marketing and Management Science Journals, and is the author of The Advertising and Promotion Challenge: Vaguely Right or Precisely Wrong, published by Oxford University Press. Len is also the co-founder and co-director of the Wharton-INSEAD “Leading the Effective Sales Force” executive program which is delivered each year in Singapore, Fontainebleau, and Philadelphia and has been running for over 40 years.

In 1987 Len led a team that won the Franz Edelman Award for Management Science Practical Achievement from the Institute of Management Sciences for a sales force sizing and deployment model responsible for a sales increase of $25 million annually at Syntex Laboratories.

Professor Lodish has developed models and decision support systems that have been syndicated to worldwide use.  They include MEDIAC® for media planning, CALLPLAN® and ALLOC® for sales force deployment, and PROMOTER® and PROMOTIONSCAN® for promotion planning and evaluation.  He co-led a consortium of most major consumer packaged goods manufacturers, leading advertising agencies, and the major U.S. T.V. networks in a comprehensive analysis of 381 real world split cable TV experiments entitled “How T.V. Advertising Works” which appeared as the lead article in Journal of Marketing Research in August 1995 and in 1996 won the American Marketing Association’s first Paul E. Green award for the article in the journal which was most likely to have an impact on marketing practice. In 2000 this article was also awarded the Odell award for the article in the journal that had the most impact after five years and was also judged the best article after five years by the American Marketing Association’s Advertising Special Interest Group. An update to the study published in 2007 won the best article award from the editors of Journal of Advertising Research.

Len received a Ph.D. (Marketing and Operations Research) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in 1968 and an A.B. (Mathematics) from Kenyon College in 1965.

In 1996 Len and his wife Susan pedaled their tandem bicycle across the U.S., and since then have done long distance bicycle rides each year which have raised over $1,800,000 for the A.L.S. (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Association. He is an Overseer of the Philadelphia ALS Organization and a director of Penn Hillel and Neighborhood Bike Works.  Len is a licensed sailplane pilot and ardent bicycle commuter.

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Research

  • Leonard Lodish and C. B. Bhattacharya (Working), A System for Monitoring Brand Health.

  • Leonard Lodish and C. B. Bhattacharya (Under Review), Brand Health: Basic Concepts and a Store Scanner Data Application.

  • Leonard Lodish and Amy Kallianpur (Under Review), Myopia and Competitive Reputations in De-Escalating Promotional Compilation: Game Theoretic Intuition versus Naïve Decision Making.

  • Leonard Lodish and C. B. Bhattacharya (Working), Towards a System for Monitoring Brand Health.

    Abstract: In recent years business strategists have criticized managers for “market share mentality”— an over-reliance on market share to measure brand performance. To build long-term customer franchise, they suggest, more sensitive measures reflective of underlying “brand health” are needed. This raises some important questions for marketing researchers. What is brand health? What are its components? How do we measure brand health? How does it relate to future brand performance?

  • Leonard Lodish, Vicki Morwitz, Manoj Thomas (Under Review), When do Higher Prices Increase Demand? The Dual Role of Price in Consumers’ Judgments.

    Abstract: Drawing on literature on judgment and decision-making, we examine the proposition that price serves two distinct roles in consumers’ value judgments. First, as a product attribute, price affects the perceived similarity of the target product to the mental prototype of a higher or lower quality product. However, price is not the only attribute used to make similarity based quality judgments. Other relevant and available product attributes moderate the effect of price on quality judgments. Second, as a measure of sacrifice, price serves as the benchmark for comparing utility gains from superior product quality. However, this comparison process is dynamic because the relative importance of money and product quality changes across consumption occasions. We present a signal detection model of consumer’s price-value judgment to explain how high prices simultaneously increase as well as decrease purchase intentions. We describe how managers can use this model of value judgment to identify situations when higher price may increase demand.

  • Abba M. Krieger, Leonard Lodish, Ye Hu (2016), An Integrated Procedure to Pretest and Select Advertising Campaigns for TV and Beyond, Journal of Customer Needs and Solutions, 3 (2), pp. 81-93. 10.1007/s40547-016-0065-4

  • David Bell, JeongHye Choi, Leonard Lodish (2012), What Matters Most in Internet Retailing, MIT Sloan Management Review, 54, pp. 27-33.

  • Jeonghye Choi, David Bell, Leonard Lodish (2012), Traditional and IS-Enabled Customer Acquisition on the Internet, Management Science, 58, pp. 754-769.

  • Leonard Lodish, Murali K. Mantrala, Sonke Albers, Fabio Caldieraro, Ove Jensen, Kissan Joseph, Manfred Krafft, Chakravarthi Narasimhan, Srinath Gopalakrishna, Andris Zoltners, Rajiv Lal (2010), Sales Force Modeling, Marketing Letters.

    Abstract: Inspired by Erin Anderson’s contributions to sales force research, this paper focuses on research that utilizes quantitative models to investigate important questions in sales force management. The purpose is to summarize several significant developments in knowledge over the last 40 years and identify major opportunities for impactful theoretical, empirical, and decision model-based research in the future.

  • Leonard Lodish, Y. Hu, A. Krieger, Babak Hayati (2009), An Update of Real-World TV Advertising Tests, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 49, No. 3 (June 2009), 201-206.

    Abstract: An analysis is performed on the results of 50 recent real-world TV advertising tests conducted by Information Resources, Inc. to update the findings of Lodish et al. [Journal of Marketing Research 32, 2 (1995): 125-39] and Hu, Lodish, and Krieger (Hu et al.) [Journal of Advertising Research 47, 3 (2007): 341-53]. Overall, the improvement of TV advertising sales effectiveness from media weight increase is significant for established products, consistent with Hu et al.'s finding based on tests completed after 1995, further confirming that TV advertising effectiveness has improved during recent years. The new results continue to confirm that using valid and reliable pretests to assess TV advertising effectiveness should be an important practice in the industry. INSET: EMPIRICAL GENERALIZATION.

Teaching

All Courses

  • MKTG2410 - Entrepreneurial Mktg

    This course focuses on the real life marketing challenges involved in launching an entrepreneurial venture. The primary goal of the course will to provide a roadmap for students seeking to actively engage as entrepreneurs, investors or managers in the startup culture. Many of the entrepreneurial marketing principles studied in this course will be equally applicable to mid-size and larger companies seeking new approaches to drive top-line growth. The course will address how start-ups, early growth stage and more mature companies have used entrepreneurial marketing as an essential competitive weapon to grow their businesses by gaining customers, driving revenue, acquiring funding and recruiting A-level employees, advisors and directors. Students will form teams and select an idea/concept for an entrepreneurial venture, and by the conclusion of the course will have developed a fully fleshed out and testable marketing plan. Preferably, the selected venture will be one that one or more members of the team would consider implementing, should their plan prove feasible.

  • MKTG7410 - Entrepreneurial Mktg

    This course focuses on the real life marketing challenges involved in launching an entrepreneurial venture. The primary goal of the course will to provide a roadmap for students seeking to actively engage as entrepreneurs, investors or managers in the startup culture. Many of the entrepreneurial marketing principles studied in this course will be equally applicable to mid-size and larger companies seeking new approaches to drive top-line growth. The course will address how start-ups, early growth stage and more mature companies have used entrepreneurial marketing as an essential competitive weapon to grow their businesses by gaining customers, driving revenue, acquiring funding and recruiting A-level employees, advisors and directors. Students will form teams and select an idea/concept for an entrepreneurial venture, and by the conclusion of the course will have developed a fully fleshed out and testable marketing plan. Preferably, the selected venture will be one that one or more members of the team would consider implementing, should their plan prove feasible.

  • MKTG8990 - Independent Study

    A student contemplating an independent study project must first find a faculty member who agrees to supervise and approve the student's written proposal as an independent study (MKTG 899). If a student wishes the proposed work to be used to meet the ASP requirement, he/she should then submit the approved proposal to the MBA adviser who will determine if it is an appropriate substitute. Such substitutions will only be approved prior to the beginning of the semester.

Awards and Honors

  • Journal of Advertising Research – Award for Best Paper of 2007 (received with co-authors Abba Krieger and Ye Hu), 2008 Description

    “An Analysis of Real World TV Advertising Tests: A 15-Year Update”, from JAR volume 47, issue 3, has been voted by the Journal of Advertising Research Editorial Board as the JAR Best Paper of 2007.The JAR Best Paper Prize was introduced this year to recognize the contribution of JAR authors to furthering the industry’s knowledge of advertising research.

  • Elected member of Cleveland Heights High School Hall of Fame, 2000
  • O’Dell Award for Best Paper in Journal of Marketing Research, 2000
  • Honorary Doctor of Laws degree, Kenyon College, 1999
  • Received (with co-authors) the first Paul E. Green award for the article most likely to impact the practice of marketing in Journal of Marketing Research, 1996
  • Finalist for the 1987 O’dell Award for the best paper in Journal of Marketing Research, 1992 Description

    (with Erin
    Anderson and Barton Weitz)

  • Finalist for the 1986 O’Dell Award for the best paper in Journal of Marketing Research (with Richard Batsell), 1991
  • Runner-up Award for the best article in the Marketing Science Literature, 1987 (with M. Abraham), 1987
  • First Prize, the 1987 Edelman Award for Management Science Achievement, given by the T.I.M.S., 1987
  • College on the Practice of Management Science, with E. Curtis, M. Ness, and K. Simpson, 1987 Description

    (the
    first time in 16 years that this $6,000 award was given to a marketing entry)

  • Finalist, T.I.M.S. College on the Practice of Management Science Prize Competition, 1977, with, 1977
  • Second Prize of $500 in McKinsey Foundation Worldwide Thesis Competition, 1969
  • Listed in Who’s Who of America, 1969 Description

    Until Present

  • Special mention for Lanchester Prize, Operations Research Society of America, 1969
  • National Media Award sponsored by MEDIA/SCOPE Magazine, 1969

Activity

Latest Research

Leonard Lodish and C. B. Bhattacharya (Working), A System for Monitoring Brand Health.
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